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Friday, July 08, 2011

News From Here & There

Indie Filmmaking

Edward Burns is an indie director/actor who has been working hard to promote his latest film, Newlyweds. If you're in the indie film business you should follow Ed (@edward_burns) for tips and inspiration; at the moment you'll learn a lot about promotion through different mediums!

Consider the career of Edward Burns, whose performances in Entourage and Saving Private Ryan have overshadowed compelling work as a writer-director of 11 films. His fourth, the well-regarded Sidewalks of New York, cost $1,000,000; Newlyweds, his latest, just $9,000. His is an example of the emerging phenomenon.

Rapid Prototyping | Scott Smith | E-FilmmakingScott Smith has started a new blog on filmmaking, and in this post he explains how it quickly went from idea to execution. He also talks about how "rapid prototyping" as it applies to modern filmmaking:

In filmmaking terms, it’s Edward Burns having a meeting at the end of 2010 with the Tribeca Film Festival people and coming up with an idea that he should make a feature to show for the festival’s 10th year and a few months later the film is written, cast, shot, edited and premiered. In an industry where the typical film can be in development for 3 to 5 years before it gets produced (or dies in development) Burns’ Newlyweds is definitely prototyping.

Other News

GET v.15 Coming Soon | AV3 Software
'Get' is a speech recognition tool that can be used to search dialog tracks in Final Cut Pro. AV3 has sent out an announcement that v1.5 will be upcoming soon, and have indicated a couple of coming improvements:

You will be able to choose which tracks Get indexes on a Watched Folder or Project basis, from directly within the application.

Most of the students enroll in Reel Lives with visions of Hollywood in mind, but those quickly change when they learn the power of documentary films. "I'm a believer, I think doc filmmakers are really the new journalists. I think our students see that pretty quickly."

Adapter is a Free Everything-to-Everything Transcoding App for Mac and Windows | NoFilmSchoolNoFilmSchool has a short write-up on a beta tool for video transcoding; Adapter.
NOTE: the comment that Apple Compressor is not 64-bit may be erroneous. Apple says that it is 64-bit; if the codec it is using is 64-bit, but it switches to 32-bit when it has to. It's unknown at the moment which codecs are 64-bit and which are 32-bit, and whether some of these will be updated with the release of Lion.

Where these two cameras differ the most from what I can tell is the shutter drive mechanics which has more to do with photography. The T3i can shoot 3.7fps while the 60D shoots 5.7. The T3i shoots up to 1/4000 of a second and the 60D at 1/8000.

The topics I have been going through are not the most sexy ones, but I have to say that Black Magic has done a great job to simplify the workflow. In the next part I will have a look at some more sexy new features like Curve Grading, Stabilization etc.

Here’s the problem: Resolve is designed for FCP XML Version 5. Premiere can only import and export FCP XML Version 4 (or earlier).

Here’s the work-around: It *is* possible to move between Resolve and Premiere… but only if you own FCP which can translate up and down between FCP XML Versions 4 & 5!

Canon XF workflow with FCPX | Daniel Houghton | Houghton Multimedia
A work-around for using footage from the Canon XF100 in Final Cut Pro X...using Adobe Media Encoder! He outlines the process:

Each time you hit record on the XF100, it creates a new folder on the card that contains several files specific to each shot (as you can see below). The only one you need to edit with is the actual .mxf file. Instead of digging through each folder yourself and finding all the files, you can have automator do this for you.